Reminds me of someone I know, mostly online, who every now and then likes to complain that SF isnt literature. To which I reply, yes it isnt, it SF. THen he goes on about how SF doesn't provide great insights into humanity and life and stuff like that, and I point out that none of the great literature I have read did that either, and so the discussions go circling round.

I especially admire the Writer At Work series. I don't know enough about the writers to get all of the jokes, but I love how he uses the same basic layout and setup for each strip. It makes the strips like a series of poems, all of the same form.

Guthrie, your friend has succumbed to a common fallacy -- the belief that the words "art" and "literature" only refer to great art and great literature.

I think people come to believe this because they are taught about the great, classic examples of each in school, just like you're only taught about major, important events in history class. So "historic" comes to mean "worthy of being taught in history class", and "art" and "literature" come to mean "worthy of being taught in art or literature class".

And, of course, if a writer gets nationally recognized, he is no longer science fiction. Because if it's literature, it can't be science fiction. Nope nope.

(Margaret Atwood is science fiction. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is fantasy. Harlan Ellison is, plausibly, the only person who can reasonably claim he is not (Ellison is his own beast) and he hasn't entirely disowned the genre.)

I just got back from the NC Writer's Network Conference where I was on a panel to discuss blogging and podcasting. They invited me to do a reading. Oh, I should have said no...

Each person had 10 min. There were seven of us. Here's a sample: a story where a woman's mother's dying and she thinks the woman is an infant (taken to a ghastly conclusion), an essay about pig sex, and an excerpt from a book about women on vacation together looking back on their lives. Oh, and superheroes (guess who that one was).

I had to attend a number of readings of work in prgress, at an MFA course I did a number of years back (the things one will do to get a travel allowance, really, I ought to be wearing a red minidress and fishnets).

Anyway, the last of these I attended, we had: a short piece that consisted mostly of a conversation about how futile it was to attempt communication at all, in which it turned out that all the characters are the same person; a chapter from a novel attempting to represent the internal discourse of a severely autistic protagonist; and my own story, in which an alien discovers that Terrans have been covertly guiding the breeding of his species in order to reduce its extreme levels of aggression.

It was remarked after one of these, that the estrangement tends to distract, and worse, to divert attention. Guess which one.

Ah, "estrangement". This refers to the definition of science fiction and fantasy given by Darko Suvin, who wrote (about 1985, from memory) that SFF is text that is distinguished by "an estrangement", that is, a specific difference from current received reality, and by an attempt at cognition about it. The word therefore refers to the intent of the text, not directly to the effect on the reader.

The criticism was therefore to the effect that writing about aliens was just too weird compared with the sensible and realistic discourse of the other pieces, and would tend to squick the reader.

IIRC, Suvin's use of estrangement for definition of SF builds on introduction of this term by Viktor hklovsky, quite a big shot in semiotics. SFE links it only to Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, but wikipedia: Alienation effect suggests the two are closely related.

As for "received reality", some 700 Google hits but first SERPs don't seem particularly academic, and the mentions in Books and Scholar search also don't use it as a fixed term.

"Received reality" sounds like doublespeak for the "write what you know" I kept getting hammered with in college.

Or, in lit speak, "You don't know any extra terrestrial aliens therefore you can't write sensibly about them. Neither will the reader will understand them because they have experienced nothing that relates to your work. If you persist in insisting that fiction about aliens is legitmate authorship, you will learn you are mistaken by the lack of connectivity with your readership." More succintly "If it's not angst and head space, it doesn't count. Context doesn't matter."

By "received reality" I only meant the reality we all know exists around us, without silly stuff like, oh, rocket ships or elves or other things we all know don't exist or can't happen. I added "received" to try to weasel out of the inevitable response, viz, that nobody really knows if what we think of as real is actually real or not, and if it's real, what anybody else thinks of it.

I tried to defend myself by saying that the story was actually postcolonialist in discourse and might be considered familiar territory. Brother, was I handed my head.

"If it's not angst and head space, it doesn't count. Context doesn't matter."

I feel your pain.

The assumption seems to be that no-one can have angst and head space in a space ship - I guess it's the zero gravity making everything light. A gritty urban setting, or Tuscany, is the only place to set Real Stories. Preferably about a Geisha or a Veiled Muslim, because they are so hot right now.

I always thought "Write what you know" was more what you might call a guideline</Barbossa> for fledging writers trying to find their voice. When you've found your voice, then you could use the other tools of research and imagination to start writing about geishas, muslims, martians and other fabled creatures.

Dave @ 42: And then there are those who care exclusively about story, and couldn't care less whether the characters are (as a favorable review said of a book I rather enjoyed) cut out of a very sturdy brand of cardboard.

I kinda want both, myself. Works that tend too far into one direction or another leave me unsatisfied, in different ways.

One minute it was a Tokyo evening, with doors closing, shutters drawn, the unicorns resting calmly in their stalls, naiads still playing in every fountain, muezzin calling the adhan from the minaret, the geisha girls flitting like shards of light in their coloured robes among the crowded streets. And then the Martian Heat-Ray vaporised the whole scene.

48: Few would have believed, thirteen hundred years after the Hegira, that the affairs of the Dar al-Islam were being watched and scrutinised by intelligences far in advance of our own...

-- from The Jihad of the Worlds

Actually, this, too, is starting to take shape. There are a few nice vignettes - Janissaries in their white robes bursting into flame as they try to storm the capsule's landing site outside Edo; the heroic last stand of the Sultan's galleys against the Martians' flying ironclads in the La Perouse Strait...

You could turn it into a very nice allegory. Just as the original was "Martians: Earthmen:: the West: the rest of the world", this could be "Martians:Earthmen::the West:Muslims".

It's an alternate history, of course, starting with a Muslim China in the Middle Ages (hence a Muslim Japan, you see...)

The door at the base of a small blue minaret opened, and a wary head peered around the edge. Then a man stepped out, elderly, white-haired, dressed in old-fashioned style. His garb was indeterminate, but if anything it was the gard of a scholar, and instead of a sword there was a long flute tucked into his sash.

He smiled; a happy but not particularly cheerful smile. It was the smile of an old man who sees better than he feared. Turning his head, he called through the door, "Su-San, it is quite safe now."

A young woman emerged. "Ojiisan?" She looked around, seeing the still smoking rubble, and the charred marks that were the shadow of corpses. "Is this really Hiroshima?"

The was a sitant wail, that for a moment might have been the cry of a muezzin. But it was no declaration that God is Great, just a soulless ullulation.

My friend Elisabeth Vonarburg said that 'spam' is 'pourriel' in French. It comes from 'pourri', which means 'rotten', and 'el' is the abbreviation for 'electronique'. In other words, it's electronic rot. And it sounds like the name of Galadriel's no-good sister.

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